Vadamalayan Hospital is one of the oldest private Hospital in Madurai. Recently I had to visit the Hospital for and the following are my observations.
1) The equipments used by the Hospital are either faulty or outdated which shows wrong reading and the doctors only base their findings on these readings.
2) Doctors use every opportunity to snatch money from the patients and there is no service motive. The communication with the patients is really very poor and it looks like patients are totally at their mercy.
3) Majority of the rooms are not clean and their A/c rooms mostly stinks. A normal person will become patient after visiting the hospital toilets (Both inside the rooms as well as the common toilets). But the charges are more than per day charge of a 5 star hotel room.
4) Half the time you will not have water available in the rooms and it is the patients responsibility make sure that he gets the required service daily by fighting with the Administrators of the Hospital. In majority of the cases administration does not take respobsibility of the service, but at the end of the day everything is charged without default.
5) If you go to pharmacy and even if you ask for 1 Paracetamol, they will take one hour to deliver the Medicine. The process is as follows. First there is a person who prepares the bill and makes sure that you have enough money to pay for the medicine. Second it is given to another person who will search for the medicine (Since majority of them are freshers they will always need help from their seniors to get the medicine which will take minimum 30 min). Third, there is another person who verifies the medicine. Fourth the person sitting in the Billing counter who once again verifies the medicine and the Bill and collects the payment. There could be simplified if you have experience in this layer.
6) The Middle layer and Lower layer of the Hospital (Nurses, Lab technicians, Farmacist etc) is totally inexperienced. Majority of the hospital runs on training staff who do not even know the basic tasks and skills. So the main concentration is to pay less to the employees and snatch more the patients. Due to this the quality of service is really very poor.
7) With the introduction of insurence company, the whole motive of treatment has changed. Now they are looking at each individual as an opportunity to earn money. Say for example in recent times the number of cessarian delivery cases has increased more than 800% (If earlier it was 10 per 100, now it is 90 per 100). Why is it so. Have women lost the ability to deliver the baby or have doctors lost the skill in delivering the baby normally ?
Medical profession is a very noble one. Only those people who have service motive should study medicine as well as start hospitals. Else Hospitals will be no different from butcher shop where they will even kill humans for money. Hope that not only Vadamalayan but also all the other Hospitals in the country change for good for the Country and the People.